Christmas Music

I just changed out the 5 CD’s I’ve had in my changer since my knee replacement in mid-September.  Actually, they were in there before that.  I listened to them all during the fall, and never grew tired of them.  They were:

               Chet- Chet Baker

               Playboys- Chet Baker and Art Pepper

               Disc 2 of the Modern Jazz Archive-Art Pepper

               Countdown (2 disc set)-John Coltrane

I’m compelled to find out about the lives of these people from whom I only hear notes.  I almost wish I hadn’t read Art Pepper’s story.  He and Chet Baker came to represent the American West Coast Jazz movement.  I love their music because they were wildly inventive and creative, Pepper on Saxophone and Baker on trumpet and vocals.

While both broke away from playing in bands and became their own musical masters, they couldn’t shake the tragedy of heroin addiction.  Art Pepper died of a drug-related cerebral hemorrhage in 1982 at 57.  Chet Baker OD’d in 1988 at age 58 in an Amsterdam hotel.  Both lived in and out of prison.  Their most productive musical years were interrupted by periods of poverty and squalor.  Better to listen to their passion, which was music, than study their very mortal lives.  That’s what they would prefer us to do I think.

John Coltrane’s time on earth proved to be a little better.  Born in 1926 he found success as a sax player while performing in a post World War II all-white U.S. Navy Band as a “guest” (but regular) performer.  Following his term in the service, he plunged into the blossoming bebop scene and never looked back, devoting the rest of his life to jazz.

Coltrane had a spiritual awakening in 1957, finding inspiration in all religions, and credits that discovery with his ability to overcome a heroin and alcohol problem that had plagued him since 1948.  He played with all the jazz greats and is regarded as one himself.

John Coltrane died suddenly at age 40 of liver cancer.  Other biographers attribute his death to chronic hepatitis suffered during his days as a heroin addict.  He was posthumously awarded a special citation by the Nobel Prize Committee in 2007 for his “masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz.”

As good as those musicians are, it is winter now and I switched to classical music.  Here’s what is filling the shack starting yesterday.

Brandenburg Concertos 1,2,3,4,5,6 (two discs)        - Johan Sebastian Bach

Symphony No.2/Karelia/Finlandia                            - Jean Sibelius

Clarinet Concertos in A Major                                   -W. Amadeus Mozart

Sheherazade, Russian Easter Overture, y mas           - Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

The stories of these musicians is a whole different deal.  They were working earlier in history on a different and kinder model.  They lived in Europe, were valued by their countrymen, subsidized by both church and state, and supported according to their talent with money and privilege.  Their lives did not revolve around record sales or plays on iTunes.

J.S. Bach lived from 1685-1750, lasting 65 years.  Not bad for back then.  He was from a long line of Bachs supported by the church and the town of Eisenach, Germany.  Music was everything to him and his family.  He took up the family business and played the game.  Life was good. 

  

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had the shortest life among this random group of five CD musicians.  He died at 35 and was buried in a pauper’s grave in St. Mark’s cemetery in Vienna, Austria.  Don’t feel too bad for him.  A child prodigy, he grew up to be eccentric, a little crazy, and a musical genius.  He lived hard, drank too much, but wrote over 600 pieces of some of the most haunting and lasting music the world has ever known.  Had he played the game differently, more conservatively, he could have lived comfortably like the other Mozarts.  Wolfgang went his own way.  Most like Art Pepper and Chet Baker methinks.

Nikolai Rimsy-Korsakoff lived in Russia between 1844 and 1908.  Like many classical composers, he was privileged, born into a family of Russian nobility, also supported by church and state.  Who else could afford all those modern instruments, hire all the players, and put them in a hall with large audiences?  It was a rich man’s game, and Nikolai played it well.  Ironically his music hearkened to Russian folk tales.  He took the tunes of poor Russians playing Balalaikas in a shacks and stoked them up with the rich tones that the new musical technology of his day afforded him.

Jean Sibelius lived to be 92, dying in 1957.  He cranked out seven symphonies while living in Finland, and a bunch of other tunes, before going silent during the last 30 years of his life.  It was like he retired.  They figure he was not pleased with the 8^th symphony.  Could be he had high standards.  He burned that 8^th symphony, along with the rest of his remaining unpublished stuff.  The people of Finland revered him.  He wrote beautiful music.  Be still my soul.

Wait a minute?  Isn’t this blog supposed to be about Christmas music?  Why yes it is.  Let me be brief.  Christmas music is sappy and sentimental.  There’s a reason it only gets played for a month once a year.  It’s not very good.

We do it to ourselves I think.  We romanticize both the Christmas holiday and the music around it.  I guess it is normal to reminisce, to hearken back to our childhoods, to want to recapture a feeling we had years ago.  In an effort to do so we listen to worn out tunes and anachronistic lyrics, sometimes recycled and sung by newer artists, until we can’t stand it.  And then the New Year comes and thankfully it’s over. 

Chestnuts roast, halls are decked, crooners pledge to be home, bells jingle, children laugh, noses glow, and Frosty the snowman’s appearance is described over, and over, and over.  I don’t want to be a Scrooge here, but we could do better.  We could at least improve the mix, and I don’t mean with “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”  That’s a song, by the way, that my mother, as a senior citizen and a grandma herself, thought was simply awful.  I’m with you ma.

I’m searching for the modern, the not heard much, the Christmas songs with a twist.  Fact is Christmas is not a magical time for everyone.  Along with dreams of a white Christmas, melancholy and sadness can and does flood in. 

Not everyone wants to go home for Christmas.  Sometimes bad memories reside there, family strife, unresolved conflict.  I think we need to be extra kind and generous at Christmas because many around us are hurting.  Maybe you.  We need kindness.  It can seem as if the whole world is merry and bright but us.  Are there songs that capture that?

Try this one.  But first, check out the lyrics. 

River

It's coming on Christmas
They're cutting down trees
They're putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

But it don't snow here
It stays pretty green
I'm going to make a lot of money
Then I'm going to quit this crazy scene
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly
Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

I made my baby cry

He tried hard to help me
You know, he put me at ease
And he loved me so naughty
Made me weak in the knees

Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

I'm so hard to handle
I'm selfish and I'm sad

Now I've gone and lost the best baby
That I ever had
Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly
Oh I wish I had a river
I made my baby say goodbye

It's coming on Christmas
They're cutting down trees
They're putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

It was written in 1971 by a young 27-year old Joni Mitchell.

She was probably hunched over a piano late at night in Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles where she lived at the time.  She feels bad about herself.  She pushed away a person who loved her, quite possibly a person she loved in return.  And as she tries to reconcile her actions with her feelings, she wants nothing more than to be somewhere else.

Maybe she wants to be a little girl in Saskatoon, Canada where she was born, with high boot white figure skates laced to her feet, a cold wind in her face at Christmas, skinny silver blades gliding across the ice on the Saskatchewan river, with that feeling of freedom you get when you are skating, flying away, and everything is good.  You never imagine then that when you are old it will be so hard to recapture the thrill of such moments.

So there’s that about Christmas, which points to a need for a different kind of Christmas song for many.  Please don’t feel alone if you feel that way.  You’re not alone at all. 

Let’s be kind to one another for a while shall we?

Merry Christmas everybody.

Press CTRL and click below to hear the song or find it and listen another way.  It’s beautiful.

http://www.psy.co/una-cancin-de-navidad-para-aquellos-que-tienen-una-temporada-de-vacaciones-agitada.html